Improving employee productivity is always a goal for employers. Even the most productive employees can procrastinate, waste time, or allow their personal life to affect their productivity levels.
Anything can adversely affect employee productivity. Even the temperature of the room! Amazingly, 53% of workers say they are less productive in a room that’s too cold.
Remote working is primarily seen as productivity-positive. According to Condeco, 64% of business leaders say blended working weeks are beneficial for productivity.
However, it can be hard to build strong coworking connections when team members are remote or have opted for a blended work week. Those connections are vital for fostering powerful work teams and encouraging workplace productivity.
If you want to forge meaningful coworking relationships, an online community is a great option. In an online community, employers can improve productivity and help their workforce complete tasks, all while building more cohesive teams.
Online communities can connect your team regardless of location, providing a venue for conversation, questions, and fun. And a learning management system (LMS) is the best way to facilitate online communities.
What is an LMS?
A learning management system is software that allows organisations to create online courses and assign them to learners in their organisation. But an LMS can be so much more.
In an LMS, you can create online communities based on a user’s role. So you may have distinct online communities for your sales team, marketing team, HR team, etc. You could also build a company-wide online community or communities for related teams like sales & marketing to collaborate.
A good LMS is not only built to encourage thriving online communities, but it also connects your team to a larger culture of learning. Access to your company’s library of training materials allows your team members to build coworker relationships while upskilling and honing their professional talents.
Connect your remote teams
The first way an online community helps increase productivity is by connecting your team members.
Online communities are location-agnostic, giving remote teams a common venue for asking questions and sharing ideas.
If your organisation offers blended working, online communities can be a great support tool for your work-from-home days, bolstering coworker connections even when you’re out of the office. An online community lets you keep the conversation going even when the office is empty.
Harness the power of collective knowledge
Learning is a powerful way to connect team members. Shared learning experiences can solidify working relationships and make teams stronger.
An online community is a way to extend the power of shared learning long after the course is completed. In an online community, coworkers can share their knowledge to answer questions or stoke discussion.
New team members can ask questions and bond with their coworkers, and experienced team members can offer quick answers without taking much time from their regular duties.
Plus, in an LMS, discussions are searchable. That means employees can search for conversations about topics and find answers immediately. If their question isn’t answered within the online community feature, they can consult your company’s learning library of course materials, all housed in the LMS.
Poll the community to guide learning goals
An online community can be a source of inspiration when planning your company’s employee training goals. You can engage with your employees to discover the skills and development training that will have the most significant impact.
When you poll your online communities, you may find that your team would respond better to online courses about time management or productivity tips rather than receiving a flat to-do list.
You can also discover the skills your workforce would like to build, from honing their sales skills to mastering marketing CRMs. For each of your teams, you can deliver the training that helps them perform their duties better, improving productivity across the company.
Interacting with your online community will boost morale and brand positivity. Employees who feel their opinion matters will have higher work efficiency and stay with your company longer. You can encourage honest conversation in an online community that helps your employees feel heard.
Turn coworkers into accountability partners
It’s easy for any employee to become distracted, and that’s especially true for remote workers.
You can use an online community to minimise distractions by encouraging coworkers to use one another as accountability partners.
By messaging one another in the online community, coworkers can set goals for a 40-45 minute block of work time and then check in with one another again at the end of the session. They can give each other encouragement and feedback for goals met and goals missed.
Using an online community as a vehicle for accountability sets a company-wide standard of healthy time management. Friendly coworker encouragement will boost productivity and allow everyone to have a productive day.
Customer communities improve productivity, too
We’ve focused on employee communities, but customer-focused online communities also have a role in increasing productivity.
When you build a customer community, you can share product information and tips with all your customers. They’ll know where to find answers to frequently asked product questions and can ask one another for advice and help.
All the tasks that bog down your customer service team, like answering repetitive product questions, can be redirected to the customer community. That way, your customer service team can focus on the tickets needing deeper attention.
The LMS that fosters increased productivity
LearnRight delivers solid online community features designed to build connections between learners and encourage better productivity.
Within LearnRight, you can create countless online communities and assign users based on role or group. Learners can chat and post to the public forum, share files, or message one another privately.
And because their community experience is based on their role or group, you can easily connect them with the online courses they need for employee training and development.
You can message the entire community about upcoming training or compliance requirements and share links to essential courses. That way, each community can access the learning materials they need for skills development and compliance.
We’d love to show you how LearnRight can increase your productivity and engage your workforce in productivity-boosting skills training.
Book a tour of LearnRight to see our online community features in action!
